Media Items
Related to religion and health
- The NHS Centre for Involvement
21 Jul 2008. The Framework for Partnership published today outlines new support and £7.5m worth of investment to encourage and enable greater local activity bringing people from different religions and beliefs together. It also reaffirms government support for the valuable work faith groups contribute to delivering services, responding to some of the toughest challenges that society faces.
Church based health promotion campaigns have become a well-established means of delivering messages to local communities. Such campaigns can vary in terms of whether they use places of worship simply as a location (faith-placed) or whether they seek to leverage religious values and beliefs in order to communicate the health promotion message (faith-based).
There are a number of factors accredited with making places of worship attractive venues where social marketers can access otherwise be hard to reach ethnic and religious groups (Sternberg 2006). Within these communities they may be particularly useful as a means of accessing women who are likely to participate in and value church experiences and therefore may be more likely to attend health promotion programs in churches (Wells et al 1990) and mosques (Bader et al 2006).
Case for working with Faith Based Organisations
The case for working with faith‐based organizations , as one community among many critical agents of change, is no longer a matter of discussion, but rather, one of considered, systematic and deliberate engagement of the like‐minded partners among them. For many years, international development has been a field dominated by largely ‘secular’ agents of development, with a preference for keeping faith and faith‐related matters strictly in the so‐ called ‘private’ domains. At the same time, many scholars, human rights activists, and indeed, development actors, have argued persuasively that the dividing line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is increasingly blurred. This is increasingly the case in a globalised world where information technology enables rapid and pervasive information flows.
http://www.unfpa.org/culture/docs/fbo_engagement.pdf
Questioning the value of working with Faith Based Organisations
A presentation entitled, "Assessing the contribution of Faith-Based Organisations in Development: Mythical or Real?" by Kirmani and Davis (2010) deals with the issues surrounding working with faith based organisations in Karachi, Pakistan. The slide below is taken from their presentation and it shows the advantages and disadvantaages of working with FBOs.
http://www.globalphilanthropy.ca/images/uploads/Faith_Based_Organizations_(FBOs)_workshop_at_CIVICUS_Montreal_2010.pdf
